By William M. Arkin Special to washingtonpost.com Monday, September 13, 1999

Adm. James O. Ellis is the real invisible man. He had ultimate
responsibility for the air war against Yugoslavia, but a Lexis-Nexis
search finds that he was mentioned in only six stories  none of them in
major U.S. newspapers  during the 78-day conflict. Ellis, based in
Naples, supervised the NATO operations center and was the direct
commander of the U.S. military's "Noble Anvil" joint task force during
Operation Allied Force.

This week, a postwar PowerPoint presentation prepared by Ellis's staff
has been winging its way around via e-mail. Entitled "A View From the
Top," it is full of the kind of inside baseball that nourishes Beltway
policy wonks.

Most notable is one slide that says: "We were lucky." It is the perfect
political outcome: critical yet indeterminate, a conclusion that
doesn't commit the sin of actually coming to a conclusion, one that
allows all comers to take credit or vie for the spoils.

Increasing the Odds

From reading the Ellis briefing, the admiral, like others, is at a loss
to explain what exactly brought Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to
the negotiating table. Instead of going out on a limb to claim that it
was this or that "strategic" target group in Serbia or the
now-discredited effort to attack and destroy Yugoslav forces in the
south, or some inscrutable strategy of military leadership, or anything,
he cites luck.

''Luck shouldn't be 'a principle of war for the next commander.' ''  Adm. James Ellis

What are the fiscal and policy implications of luck? More planes and
weapons. Better technology. Finer intelligence. Luck shouldn't be "a
principle of war for the next commander," Ellis cautions. Luck also
doesn't mean that the military evidently has quite enough to muddle
through. Nor does luck suggest that maybe the military needs to step
back and rethink all of the fundamentals to ensure that the next
conflict isn't a crap-shoot. Ellis may have four stars, but he isn't of
a high enough rank to counsel that judgment.

Delete the Luck Slide

Was it luck? Ellis goes through a predictable laundry list of dangers
and interests that are hot in the military: Collateral damage ("every
incident is a perceived failure and will be exploited publicly"); bad
weather ("all-weather weapons are needed: invest accordingly");
information warfare ("at once a great success ... and perhaps the
greatest failure of the war"); platforms, systems, replacement costs
("impacts of this campaign will be felt for years").

He decries the political decision to rule out a credible threat of
ground invasion (read: lighter Army units, better airlift and sealift,
more systems to get the services to cooperate better). Yet buried on
that same slide is a telling contradiction of the luck thesis. Without
a ground force threatening Yugoslavia, Ellis says, "only the enemy could
decide the war was over."

Here is the conundrum. The enemy does decide. Milosevic sought a
negotiated outcome because he came to the conclusion that NATO wasn't
going to crumble, that the Russians weren't going to save Belgrade, that
collateral damage and the bombing of the Chinese Embassy weren't going to
end the war. It wasn't what NATO bombed so much as that the bombing did
not stop and that it significantly escalated in late May.

"We called this one absolutely wrong."  Adm. James Ellis

Ellis may lament that "our only sequential plan was to do more of the
same ... with more assets," but the reality was that the very deployment
of ground forces that Ellis and others think would have been so helpful
in bringing more pressure to bear on Milosevic may have caused the
alliance consensus to crumble. And that would have happened long before
the march on Belgrade.

"We called this one absolutely wrong," Ellis says, referring to the
belief that 72 hours of air attacks would force Milosevic to
capitulate. The identities of "we" are never specified. Ellis does
admit a series of bad decisions (for which he evidently takes no
responsibility), but from his perch at the top, he seems not to
understand or cannot admit that, for this conflict, all NATO could
do was to have the patience to wait for Milosevic to throw in the towel.

Delete the Briefing

Ellis's spokesman says the "View from the Top" is not necessarily
in its final form. The e-mail distribution lists, originating at the
war colleges, where it has been presented, are a Who's Who of
military analysis. It is virtual reality, but, because of its electronic
and abbreviated PowerPoint form, could be modified at any time.
Are we to conclude, then, that if the briefing proves too controversial,
or too candid, or it if doesn't hew to the politically correct consensus, that it
is only a keystroke away from deletion?

The Ellis briefing cautions that many of the new technologies of
command  such as the secure video teleconference and the glitzy graphics
possible with PowerPoint  are a "voracious consumer of
leadership and key staff working hours," subject to misinterpretation
and no substitute for "campaign planning and written orders."
Said, without a hint of irony, in a PowerPoint briefing.